


Daughter of Chastity

by Eloisa



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-05
Updated: 2012-06-05
Packaged: 2017-11-07 00:12:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/424745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eloisa/pseuds/Eloisa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tyene and her mother, on opposite sides of a communication barrier, try to live their lives as best they can.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Daughter of Chastity

The sisters’ retreat was unobtrusive in its simplicity, dull tan walls behind a rampart of sandstone from the Red Mountains.  Here where it clung to the foothills below the Prince’s Pass, it seemed to grow from the stone of Dorne itself, as much as did the olive trees that greened the cloister beyond the outer bailey.

Tyene had dismounted a few dozen yards from the barred gate, leaving her outriders behind.  Now, as she walked barefoot along the blisteringly hot path with her sand steed on a lead rein behind her, she stared at the compound and tried to feel the comfort of prayer.

Another maid would have watched for snakes underfoot.  She was the Viper’s daughter, and snakes were no concern of hers.

She stopped at the heavy door, looped her sand steed’s rein round the hitching post and waited, feeling the sun beat on her bare head, smelling her sweat mingled with that of her sand steed.  The pair of guards behind her made such a jangle as they walked their horses in slow circles.  _“You will have outriders,”_ her father had declared, and she had acquiesced, as a daughter should.

A small grille in the left of the door opened.  “Who approaches?” a woman asked.

“A pilgrim, to visit your sept.  May I enter, sister?”

“You have come a long way,” the septa said, with some trace of wariness in her voice.  Tyene nodded, and waited.

The door bolts creaked.  “Enter – pilgrim,” the septa, still out of sight, ordered.  “Your guards may water their horses at the pump against the right wall.  The Seven give succour to all.”

To all, even men, here; “Thank you, sister,” Tyene said, and she retrieved one of her saddlebags and gestured to her outriders.  As she ventured inside, she saw one of the men retrieve her sand steed.

The septa at the door was robed in black, save for her white wimple.  A portion of the wimple covered the lower half of her face.  She gestured to Tyene to follow her through the narrow gatehouse and into the cloister.

As they walked out into the sun Tyene sneaked glances at the retreat through eyes she pretended were fixed on the sandy path around the central pebble-garden.  Doors were closed on most of the sisters’ cells and tiny windows in the thick walls would let in little light – and little heat.  Simple patterns were moulded into the stucco walls and the roof beams were lashed to wall spars with prayer-braids. 

In the open ground behind the refectory she saw more olive trees, neat and in rows, with sisters tending them in silence.  A tiny whiff of orange-scent tickled her nose, and the sound of water trickling – most likely from the spring in the cliffs that fed the pumps – took her halfway back to the Water Gardens.

At the far side of the square cloister the septa stopped by a door a little more ornate than the rest.  “Go in,” she ordered.  Tyene curtsied to the unsmiling woman and obeyed.

She entered cool candlelit gloom.  A trough embedded in the tiled floor held cold water, for all the septas went unshod; Tyene paddled through the pool, again half-imagining herself at the Water Gardens.  Her heat-numbed feet came back to life as she stepped onto the flags on the other side.

There were no benches in this sept, just a few cushions to ease the knees of the more elderly septas who came to pray at the seven altars.  Tyene set her saddlebag to one side and breathed in the candle-smoke.  She knelt before the Maiden’s altar and stared into the flames that played across it and the altar cloth that bore occasional splashes of sanctified wax.

She remembered this altar cloth, the first thing of its size she’d ever embroidered; she’d unravelled the Maiden’s crown of spring flowers and sent the petals dancing across the cloth and kissing its borders.  The letter that had gone with it had been short, written in an overly rounded hand, but she’d told herself (and her sisters) that her mother would like it anyway, because it was the first she’d been able to write herself.  She’d been seven years old: _“An auspicious age,”_ her father had said.  She remembered Ellaria’s smile.

More letters had followed, at least one every two or three months: each year she’d included another altar cloth, every one more intricate than the last.  Harvest bounty for the Mother and lamps of guidance for the Crone; swords for the Warrior; horseshoes and ploughs for the Smith; spears for the Father, crowned in stars and surmounted by a deep red sun.

And now she was thirteen.

Lost in candlelight, she prayed.  She did not know how long she knelt on the smooth flags before she heard a light splash behind her.  She rose at that, and turned.

The septa emerging from the small rear doorway wore a white gown and wimple, with a copper star hanging at her plain belt alongside a large bunch of keys.  Tyene curtsied and bowed her head.  “Greetings, sister.”

“Seven be with you.”  The retreat’s elder sister walked soft into the sept, her damp hem trailing on the floor.  “Our gatekeeper gave me news of a pilgrim come to pray here.  But it is rare for a pilgrim to _return_ – until the end of the pilgrimage.”  Tyene was silent.  The elder sister approached her, sharp eyes upon her: she probably still lit her candle to the Maiden rather than the Crone, but the candlelight in her eyes seemed to shine with all the Crone’s insight.

The septa stopped a foot from her.  “Is your journey over, child?”

“I am no child, if it pleases you.  I am flowered.”

“All the more pertinent the question, then.”

Tyene looked around the sept.  Candles in plain holders for the septas, clustered on the Maiden and Crone’s altars, with a few on the Stranger’s for those sisters who had died in the past year.  Candles in carved or inlaid or multicoloured holders for petitioners, on any and all of the seven altars.  “Perhaps – perhaps a pilgrimage is sometimes made in search of an answer.  _The Seven-Pointed Star_ says all answers are in the gods.”

“It is not wrong, in that.  The gods send us answers we cannot find alone; we simply see some before the others.”

Seeing – and a flicker from the Mother’s altar caught Tyene’s eye: a single candle in a plain ceramic candlestick, sitting quiet behind its ornate fellows that carried prayers for birthing women to the Mother above.

Was this how decisions were made?

“You only have six altar-cloths,” she observed, and she bent to her saddlebag.  Its ties felt as heavy as the world.  “I brought a seventh – if you will have it.”

The six cloths already surmounting six of the altars were white.  Tyene lifted the Stranger’s black altar-cloth from her saddlebag and touched the gold embroidery as she passed it to the elder sister.  The septa’s forefinger traced the dragon on the cloth, and she peered in the smoky candlelight at the embroidered text around it: the exhortation to accept death from Baelor the Blessed’s _Homilies on the Chaste Life_ , a traditional prayer for departed souls found in the apocrypha to _The Seven-Pointed Star_ , a tiny scrap of High Valyrian.

“You chose well,” the elder sister said with half a question in her voice, and she looked Tyene in the eyes again.  “And your other choice?”

“Life is a pilgrimage.  Mine will continue, elsewhere.”  She smiled, just a little.  “Maybe the Seven did not intend for me to be a septa.”

“I know full well your father did not.”

No, none of her letters had ever been answered.  It didn’t matter.  A candle still burned on the Mother’s altar, here in the basin of chaste womanhood, and that was enough.

She knelt at the septa’s feet.  “Will you bless me, sister?”  The white-robed woman laid a hand on her head, and she closed her eyes: and if she heard a slight rustle of another woman’s gown somewhere in the back of the room, she could not raise her head and look, before it was gone.

Outside, the septa-gatekeeper escorted her back to the door and the desert outside, where her outriders waited with the three horses in a patch of shade that had accumulated along the east wall.  Tyene mounted and rode away without looking back, more conscious than ever of the smell and taste of dust in the air, the stirrup metal trying to burn her feet through leather wrappings, the regular clop of sand steeds’ hooves just behind her.

When they had dropped below the crest of the hill and the road had taken them away from the sisters’ retreat, one of the men drew away from the other and rode up beside Tyene.  “I take it this means you aren’t taking holy vows.”

She inclined her head.  “It does, Father.”

“Count me glad of it, for my love for you.”  Oberyn reached across and touched her hand.  She saw his black eyes glittering through the sun-cloth he wore over his helm and mouth.  “I’d miss you.”

“As I would you.”  She smiled across at him.  “And I have five sisters whom I love with all my heart.  What need have I of more?”

 “We’ll see,” Oberyn said, gentle-voiced.  He picked up the pace, just a little.  “We should make Starfall by twilight.  I’ve an urge to be on a boat going back to those sisters of yours.”

-

_She stood in the back of the sept, tears moistening her grey veil, as she watched her daughter kneel at the elder sister’s feet.  She remembered crying then, when the prince had taken her baby away; words, pleas, had frozen in her throat, and she could no more voice them now than she had been able to do so then, when the grey cowl had been but newly pressed upon her._

_The Seven took nothing but what they had already given._

_Had it started with him, lithe and dark and beauteous, in a septa’s sleeping cell merely because it suited his whim to be there?  Had it instead begun with her unholy lust, an ache the gods sent to be surpassed, which had become a trial she could not endure?  It ended now, though, with the daughter she had longed to see for thirteen years, rising to leave._

_To see, but not to speak; to read, but not to write; to touch, but not to hold: how else could a silent sister live?_

_The Mother above would watch over Tyene Sand.  Tyene’s own mother never could._


End file.
